The FTK to Level-2 Interface Card (FLIC) for the ATLAS experiment

The Fast TracKer (FTK) to Level-2 Interface Card (FLIC) of the ATLAS FTK trigger upgrade is the final component in the FTK chain of custom electronics to connect the system to the High-Level trigger (HLT). The FTK performs full event tracking using the ATLAS Silicon detectors for every Level-1(L1) accepted event at 100 kHz. The FLIC is a custom Advanced Telecommunications Architecture (ATCA) card that interfaces the upstream FTK system with the ATLAS trigger and data acquisition (TDAQ) system, and allows for event processing on commercial PC blades, making use of the 10 Gb Ethernet full mesh ATCA backplane. The FLIC receives data on eight optical links at a bandwidth of about 1 Gbps per channel, reformats the data to the ATLAS standard record format, and performs a conversion from local to global module identifiers using look up tables stored in static RAM (SRAM). After processing, the event records are sent out to the TDAQ system using the simple link interface (S-LINK) protocol at 2 Gbps. The data processing is handled in two Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs, with two additional Virtex-6 FPGAs communicating with the processor blades over the ATCA backplane. The four FPGAs are connected via a full internal mesh of high speed GTX lines. This paper reports the design goals, implementation, and testing results of the FLIC.